David A. Messenger

David A. Messenger is Professor of History and Chair of the Department at USA. He previously taught at the University of Wyoming and at Carroll College in Helena, MT and joined USA in 2017. His specialty is 20th Century Europe, and he has focused on the significance of justice in the politics of reconstruction, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War. His primary focus of this has been on the foreign policies of the victorious countries in the war towards the dictatorship of Franco’s Spain in the 1940s. More broadly, Messenger is interested in human rights in international politics and the memory of war and violence in contemporary European societies and especially Spain. Messenger also works with community groups in Mobile on racial justice and is a member of the Mobile County Remembrance Commission, affiliated with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. He is also Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS).  He has held fellowships from the Government of Spain, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Mershon Center for International Strategic Studies at the Ohio State University.

Select Articles and Chapters

• “Local Government, Passive Defense and Aerial Bombardment in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-9” Journal of Contemporary History 2021

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  “Not Neutral: Spain and the Second World War” in Paul Bartrop, ed., The Routledge History of the Second World War London: Routledge, 2021. 

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  "Ambiguous Neutrality and Nazi Intelligence in Spain during the Second World War” in Andre Gerolymatos and Denis Smyth, with James Horncastle, eds., Neutral Countries as Clandestine Battlegrounds, 1939-1968: Between Two Fires. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.

• “The Geopolitics of Neutrality and the Politics of Compassion: Diplomacy, Refuge and Rescue during the Holocaust” in Hilary Earl and Simone Gigliotti, eds., A Companion to the Holocaust.  Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.

• “Nazis in Spain: Real and Imagined” in Sara J. Brenneis and Gina Hermann, eds., Spain, World War II and the Holocaust: A Critical Companion. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2020.

• "Solidarity and Non-Intervention: France and the Spanish Civil War” in Joan Maria Thomas and Raanan Rein, eds., Spain 1936: Year Zero (Brighton, UK and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2018).

• with Andrew Szanajda. “The German Secret State Police in Spain: Extending the Reach of National Socialism,” International History Review 40:2 (2018).

• “Europeanizing the Spanish Civil War: Contemporary Memory Culture in Catalonia” in Christina Kraenzle and Maria Mayr, eds., The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures - Usable Pasts and Futures. New York: Palgrave, 2017.

• “Memorial Democratic and Memory Politics in Catalonia,” Catalan Journal of Communications and Cultural Studies 8:1 (2016) . Special Issue “The Spanish Civil War 80 Years on: Discourse, Memory, Media.”

• “Petitions to Franco: Arguments and Identities of Ex-Nazis in the Effort to Avoid Repatriation from Spain, 1945-1950” in David A. Messenger and Katrin Paehler, eds., A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe From Nazis to West Germans: Self Invention, Recast Identities and the Politics of the Past after 1945.  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.

• “La colònia alemanya, els consolats nord-americans i la desnazificació a Vigo i Bilbao després de la Segona Guerra Mundial" (“The German Colony, American Consulates and Denazification in Vigo and Bilbao after the Second World War”) Segle XX: Revista catalana de história 5 (2012).

• “Beyond War Crimes: Denazification, ‘Obnoxious’ Germans and Allied Policy in Franco’s Spain after the Second World War” Contemporary European History 20:4 (2011).